Chosen to Die (10 page)

Too bad.

Ever since he’d gotten busted for Minor in Possession of Alcohol with Heidi, he’d been in a bad mood. Mom had grounded him, Heidi’s jerk of a father had warned Jeremy to never see his daughter again, and now they were stuck here with Michelle and Dad, which wasn’t all that great.

In fact, he was getting sick of them. Lucky was either trying to buddy up to him or tell him what to do. Like he was his real dad or something. It was just stupid. Then there was Michelle. Jesus, she was hot, too. Always running around in high heels and tight jeans and tops that showed off her boobs. He’d even caught a glimpse of her coming out of the shower, her hair wet, no makeup, big breasts with tiny pink nipples standing at attention from the cold. He’d noticed, though, that she wasn’t a natural blonde. The worst part was, he was pretty sure she’d seen him. Their eyes had met through the steam of the bathroom where the door was opened far enough to give him an eyeful. Since then he’d pretty much holed up in his room, and he was certain that when Michelle talked to him, she was thinking the same thing he was. There was something in her eyes, and the way her tongue was visible against her shiny lips, that told him she knew he’d seen her naked.

He couldn’t help but wonder if she’d set him up, if maybe, she wanted him to make a pass at her.
She’s your freakin’ stepmom, butthead. Don’t think like that!

Rolling off the bed, he grabbed his boots. It was time to go and get his car, call a friend, and find out what the hell had happened to his mother. He didn’t want to tell Bianca that he was worried, too, but in this case, she was right. Something was wrong. Mom would
never
have just let Lucky tell her he wanted custody. No way would she have rolled over on that. She would have fought him tooth and nail. Jeremy had figured it was a good deal. He’d decided that Mom would have been so petrified of losing Bianca and him that she would have done anything to keep them happy and this whole stupid grounding thing would disappear. Afraid of losing custody altogether, she would have let Jeremy do whatever he wanted.

Oh, come on, who are you kidding? Mom would never allow that. She’ll ride your ass until the day she dies.

“Crap,” he said under his breath, then texted his friend to come and get him. He needed to go home and look for himself, try to figure out where she was, then grab his truck so he had wheels, a way to get out of this overdecorated house with its gooey-looking pink Christmas tree and his stepfather’s hottie wife.

Throwing on his oversized camo jacket, Jeremy jammed a stocking cap onto his head before walking into the kitchen. He found a bag of kiblets for Cisco, who had tagged after him and was so excited he was barking and making tight little circles near his dish.

“About time you woke up,” Michelle drawled. Dressed in jeans, high-heeled boots, and a tight turtleneck sweater, she strolled into the kitchen. Today, her makeup was in place, her platinum hair framing her face.

Cisco wolfed down his food as Michelle snapped on the radio. Some Christmas carol started playing through the suddenly too-small kitchen. “Want some breakfast?” Was her voice breathy? Oh, God. She gave him that look again, the one that said I-know-what-you-saw, as she snagged an apron from a hook on the pantry and slid it over her head. It was a Mrs. Santa apron. Short, red, trimmed in fake white fur. She tied it around her slim waist and he couldn’t help but imagine what she would look like without the jeans and sweater, just the apron and tall black boots.

“No breakfast,” he managed as the dog finished. He automatically let Cisco outside, a breath of cold air racing into the stifling kitchen.

“You sure? I could make pancakes.” She turned and faced him, one hand holding a spatula up, and for a second he caught an image of her spanking him with it. Or him spanking her. Lying across his lap, her rounded butt red as she squealed in pleasure/pain. Oh, shit.

“No,” Jeremy croaked out. “Tyler’s on his way over to pick me up.”

“You’re leaving?” Now she was pouting.

“Uh-huh.” He
had
to get out of here and fast.

Cisco returned, bounding into the room, snow covering his whiskers. Jeremy slid the slider door closed as the phone rang so loudly he nearly jumped.

Michelle pounced on it like a cougar onto an unsuspecting antelope. “Hello?” she said into the handheld receiver. “Yes, this is Mrs. Pescoli…Uh-huh. Wait a sec, I’ll get him.” Her smile had fallen from her face and her gaze when she looked at Jeremy again had lost all of its teasing glint. She headed toward the archway leading from the kitchen and with her hand over the receiver yelled, “Luke?” No response. “Luke! Telephone! It’s the police!”

Jeremy’s heart dropped like a stone. “The police?” he repeated as Bianca, cell phone in hand, appeared.

Her eyes were round. “Is it Mom? Is she on the phone?”

Of course not, you nitwit. Michelle would have said, “It’s your ex-wife” or “Regan’s calling again” or “The bitch is on the line,” not “The police.”
He was about to say what he was thinking until he noticed the fear in Bianca’s eyes. She knew. As well as he.

“What d’ya mean, it’s the police?’” Lucky demanded, zipping up his fly and buckling his belt.

“The sheriff’s department.” Michelle was as serious as Jeremy had ever seen her as Lucky grabbed the receiver.

“Hello…yeah, this is Luke Pescoli…” He glanced at his kids in one quick sweep. “They’re here. With me. What’s going on?”

And then he listened. While Bianca bit her lip, her fingers curled over her cell in a death grip, Michelle standing like a statue in her stupid apron and holding the pancake flipper, even Cisco, for once, standing stock still, Jeremy held his breath.

“Yeah…I see…But she wasn’t inside…?”

Jeremy couldn’t stop himself. “Who? Who wasn’t inside? Mom?”

“Shut up!” Bianca hissed, but she was white as a sheet.

As if from a distance he heard a horn beep.

“Yeah, well, I’ll keep them here with me until we know more,” Luke said quietly. Sober as a judge, he hung up. The car’s horn honked impatiently.

“What?” Bianca asked, tears welling.

Jeremy’s ears started a dull ringing.

“They found your mom’s Jeep,” he said. “Down in the gully, off Horsebrier Ridge.”

Bianca let out a little squeak.

“That’s no ‘gully.’ It’s a damned abyss,” Michelle whispered.

“Is she okay?” Tears trickled down Bianca’s cheeks.

Luke sighed. “I don’t know.”

Jeremy’s heart was beating like a drum and a ringing filled his ears. “So where is she? In a hospital?”

“No,” Luke said as Bianca flung herself at her father and he held her tight. “She wasn’t in the Jeep. It was wrecked. Bad. But she wasn’t inside.”

“Oh, God,” Michelle said and while Luke was shaking his head, trying to stop her, she blurted out, “He’s got her! The damned Star-Crossed. He did this! Oh, for the love of God…”

Bianca let out a howl.

“Shut up, Michelle, we don’t know that. We don’t know anything!” Luke bit out.

The honking continued.

“Who the hell is that?” Luke demanded.

Jeremy snapped out of it. “My ride.”

“Mommy!” Bianca sobbed brokenly.

“Shh, baby, it’s gonna be all right,” Luke said without enthusiasm. Without belief.

Jeremy knew better. Nothing was going to be right. Not if everyone stood around here doing nothing. No way was he going to stick around. Without a word, he ran out of the room while patting his pockets to make sure his keys and wallet were with him. His father finally woke up and started yelling his name, but Jeremy took off through the front door, across the path he’d shoveled yesterday and toward the driveway where Tyler McAllister’s Chevy Blazer waited.

So maybe Santana wasn’t as bad as she’d originally thought, Selena considered. At least he did seem to care for Pescoli. He sat at her desk, answered questions, glared at her, his square jaw tight, his razor-thin lips compressed to an unyielding line. He hadn’t been able to offer her any further clues to Regan’s accident or abduction, but he seemed genuinely worried.

“That all?” he asked as a phone rang down the hall.

“For now.”

“You’ll keep me in the loop.”

She didn’t bother to answer or even to smile.

“Then I’ll check in.”

“Do that,” she said, her headache returning. Santana wasn’t next of kin, he wasn’t even related to Pescoli. And he wasn’t a cop. “Remember that this is a police matter. The sheriff’s department and the FBI.”

“Meaning?”

“That sometimes when a person is involved with a victim, even a potential victim, they try to help and end up getting in the way.”

“Are you warning me off?”

“If you’re thinking of doing some investigating on your own? Yeah. Leave it to the professionals.”

“I work with horses.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Not always.” She noticed that he didn’t so much as flinch. “I checked. You were with the military. Army Ranger. Right?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “And Army Intelligence?”

Not a flicker.

“I’m serious, Santana. Stay out of this. Impeding an investigation, getting into trouble with the law, it’s not worth it.”

His gaze narrowed just a bit. “But she is,” he said tersely as he climbed to his feet. He didn’t so much as smile, just added, “Let’s go, Nakita.” With a whistle to his dog, a husky that had settled in under the chair he’d taken, he strode away. Alvarez watched him go. He was sexy all right and had that I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude some women found fascinating down pat.

But he did give a damn.

About Regan.

“Pescoli’s main squeeze?”

She turned and found Sage Zoller, an elfin-looking junior detective who was just a few years younger than Alvarez, standing at the opening of her cubicle. Tiny but tough, Zoller ran marathons and mentored at-risk teens.

“Main Squeeze?” Alvarez repeated.

“I know. Archaic, huh? It’s what my parents call each other.” She was watching Santana as he strode around the corner. “Jesus, there’s something about a rugged, good-looking guy with a big dog.”

“Oh, give it up.” Alvarez was not in the mood.

“Yeah…good idea. Besides, we’ve got other fish to fry. Another car’s been spotted.”

“Another car, other than Pescoli’s Jeep?” Suddenly Zoller had all of Alvarez’s attention.

“Just this morning. Van Droz caught the call. It’s nose-down in Boxer Creek not far from Keegan’s Corner…”

Which was also known by the locals as Dead Man’s Curve.

“A red Saturn. Montana plates. Visible enough to determine that the car is registered to Elyssa O’Leary.”

Alvarez’s stomach nosedived. The name rang a bell. “She’s one of the women who’s been reported missing.” She returned to her cubicle and sat at her desk. With a few quick keystrokes, she pulled up the file, including a driver’s license and pictures of Elyssa Katherine O’Leary. Brown hair, brown eyes. Freckles. Twenty-six. Nursing student. Only child of Marlene and Brian O’Leary. Alvarez swallowed, thinking that the girl, even now, could be lashed to a tree somewhere in the rugged Montana wilderness, dragging cold air into her already-freezing lungs. “We have to find her.”

“And Pescoli.”

“Christ, yes!” she snapped. “Have you pinpointed this? Put it on the map?”

“Not yet.”

“Let’s go.” With Alvarez leading the way, they cut through several banks of cubicles to the task force room where pictures of the crime scenes and victims were posted on one wall. Nearby an enlarged map of the area had been hung and pushpins indicated the crime scenes, not only where the mangled cars had been located, but also the position of the areas where the victims had been found.

“Do you have the exact location of O’Leary’s vehicle?” Alvarez asked, stepping around a large table in the center of the room where the task force met. The chairs now were empty, pushed tight against the table by the cleaning crew. Nearby, a phone with a desk was stationed in one corner, an officer doing paperwork manning it. He looked up as they walked in, then turned back to his reports. All of the calls that came in with tips for the task force were routed here where Zoller, or whoever else was assigned the duty, answered the phones and coordinated the messages with the detectives and FBI agents.

So far, in the past few months, ever since the first victim, Theresa Charleton, had been found lashed to a hemlock tree in the wilderness, the department had logged over a thousand calls.

None of the tips had panned out.

“The Saturn was discovered”—Zoller looked at the note in her hand for confirmation—“uh, exactly 4.6 miles from the corner of Henrici and Durango.”

Alvarez located the position, right at the sharp corner, and pushed another pin in place. “If the killer’s M.O. remains the same, we should find her in a two-mile radius from the car…” She ran a finger around the area of rugged canyons and hills, forests, and stone outcroppings. “Let’s get the choppers to take a look-see, get some pictures. I think they’re already in the air for Pescoli, right?”

“Yep. No response yet.”

“They won’t find her,” Alvarez predicted as she unwillingly stuck a pin into the map, indicating the location of Pescoli’s Jeep. “It’s not time. The son of a bitch waits. Helps them heal before…”

“Yeah, I know.” Zoller was nodding, her mop of dark curls shining under the fluorescent tubes mounted in the ceiling.

Selena eyed the map critically, trying to come up with something, an area they’d overlooked where the bastard could be holed up, a spot where they would likely find his next victim.

She glanced to the blown-up copies of the notes found nailed to the trunks of the trees over the victims’ heads. They were similar with their star pattern, each just slightly different. Star-Crossed was trying to tell them something, but what?

“Has anyone called O’Leary’s parents?” she asked Zoller.

“Not yet.”

“Let’s hold off on that until we look through the car.”

Disturbed, feeling as if she were missing something, Alvarez headed back to her desk and scanned the missing persons report again. In his statement, the father, Brian, swore that no one on earth would want to harm his child, except for her boyfriend, Cesar Pelton, a divorced father of two and “hoodlum who couldn’t hold a job.” Pelton, according to Elyssa’s father, had “knocked her around” a couple of times, though no police reports had ever been filed. Elyssa’s mother, a meek woman, had stayed silent, neither agreeing or disagreeing with her husband.

The nightmare just kept getting worse, Alvarez thought as she glanced outside and noticed the first few flakes of snow beginning to fall.

Dr. Jalicia Ramsby had seen it all in her fifteen years of practice: A full spectrum of psychological diseases. Everything from clinical depression to bipolar disorder to schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, more commonly known as multiple personality disorder, and post-traumatic stress syndrome, to name a few. She’d tried to help patients who were alcoholic, suicidal, manic depressive, autistic, you name it. She’d worked in clinics, in hospitals, in shelters, even in a prison.

And she could readily spot a fake.

Or so she thought.

However, the patient in room 126 gave her pause.

As she sat in her new office at Mountain View Hospital, a bright room with a breathtaking view of the Olympic Mountains in west Seattle, she drummed her fingers on her desk and ignored an unopened bottle of Diet Pepsi, her usual jolt of caffeine in the morning. Something was off. Something she couldn’t quite define. Yet. She glanced at her tidy desk. Aside from the bottle of soda sitting on a woven coaster, there was a glass half filled with ice, a picture of her daughter at her eighth-grade graduation, a bud vase with a single white rose, and the open file. Fifteen years of notes, diagnoses, pictures, medical reports, and interviews.

Jalicia had read them over twice, trying to get a handle on Padgett Renee Long, and couldn’t. The other patients in her care she understood. They didn’t necessarily fit into neat little psychiatric boxes, but at least their conditions were consistent with other cases and gave her a frame of reference from which she could work.

Padgett was different.

She twirled her desk chair around and searched the bookcase, a virtual wall of tomes on every subject she’d found interesting. As she scanned the familiar titles, she thought of the quiet woman in 126. Not a word uttered other than prayers.

For fifteen years.

And yet there was intelligence behind Padgett’s cornflower blue eyes; Jalicia sensed it.

Not finding a title that would help, she turned back to her desk, cracked open the soft drink, poured it carefully into a glass with ice cubes, and watched the foam rise then fall, little bubbles bursting and creating a soft, tiny spray. She carried her drink to the window and stared outside.

Rain was spitting from the gray sky, clouds obscuring her view. Christmas lights twinkled in the row of fir trees lining the drive, a cheery reminder that the holidays were near.

Sipping her soda, Jalicia watched a sedan roll up the drive and take a parking spot marked for handicapped drivers. A man in a thick coat and fedora climbed out of the car, stopped at the trunk, and pulled out a wheelchair. He opened the chair and eased it close to the passenger side, then helped a portly woman into it.

Jalicia’s desk phone rang and she turned away from the window. “Dr. Ramsby,” she said, glancing at the file, then the clock. One of her men’s groups was scheduled to meet in ten minutes.

“Yes, Doctor, I just wanted to alert you that a Mr. Barton Tinneman has been calling. He’s the lawyer for Padgett Long.”

Jalicia crossed to her desk and flipped open Padgett’s file to the first page. Barton Tinneman’s name was listed.

“Did you get his number?” she asked, glancing at the clock again.

“Of course.”

“E-mail it to me and I’ll call him back as soon as I can.” She wanted to ring up the attorney right away, but decided she needed more than ten minutes for a conversation about Padgett Long.

“Will do.”

Jalicia hung up and finished her soft drink. Maybe after talking to the attorney, she’d gain some insight into the mystery that was Padgett Long.

He was gone.

There wasn’t a sound emanating from the other rooms and the firelight that usually glowed under the door was fading. If Regan was ever going to escape, now was the time.

Short of somehow sawing off her hand, however, she was screwed. There was no way to get the damned handcuff off her wrist.

Damn it, Pescoli, think. Don’t give up. This is your opportunity.

She was hurting, her ribs aching painfully, her shoulder reminding her that she needed medical attention, but she’d always had a high tolerance for pain, which had helped her excel in high school and college sports. Once, she’d played basketball on a sprained ankle and still made the winning shot. But this pain was all-enveloping and she had to concentrate to think beyond it.

She couldn’t get out unless she somehow extricated herself from the damned bed. Rolling slowly to her feet, still chained to the leg, she studied the makeup of the cot. The frame was steel and could be folded up, but the leg she was chained to was bolted down to the floor. Without a key to the handcuffs or bolt cutters, her situation appeared useless…

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Her father’s words echoed through her head.

She ran her fingers over the leg of the cot. It was welded to the piece screwed into the floor. The only possible weak place in the contraption was either the screw or the weld. Since she didn’t have a screwdriver or a knife, she had to attack the weld. Examining it as best she could in the dim light, she took heart. It looked hastily done. A weak point if she ever saw one.

Maybe there was a chance.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Once again her dad was speaking to her. She tried kicking the leg free, but in her handcuffed position couldn’t get any power. She decided it would work better if she flung herself onto the cot, hard, over and over again, hoping to weaken the weld. So she did. Throwing her weight onto the cot, jerking with her arm at the same time.

Pain rattled through her body.

She had to bite down to keep from yelping.

Five minutes later, exhausted, she collapsed on the cot. No…this wasn’t the way. She had to think of something else…

In her mind’s eye she saw an image of Nate Santana, his smile twisted and devilish, his eyes twinkling as he lay across a bed. “You can do it, Detective,” he said. “Once you set your mind to it, you can do just about anything.”

Now, lying in the cold room, she felt tears begin to well. If only she had the same faith in herself as he had.

Try again.